This book is so magical my children fell in love with it. I did too! It was fun and beautiful and we all actually learned quite a bit! I hope there will be more of these soon!

An interesting little book. The illustrations are bright and colorful, and should be appealing to little ones. We learn the words for different family members, numbers one through twenty, and several other Scottish Gaelic words and Scottish place names. There are pronunciation guides for each word, and tips on how the phonetic spellings should be pronounced. While this is geared more toward children in the United Kingdom, it would be good for any child interested in other languages.

#NaGàidheil #NetGalley

This small educational children's book is particularly interesting as it's aim is to start teaching Gaelic to children. I did not know any Gaelic and I find it very useful for adults too! This language is not easy to grasp and this is a great idea to try and make its teaching simpler.

This is a charming introduction to Scottish Gaelic for children. Due to the simplicity, I think this one would work best for roughly 5-7 year olds.

This was such a cute introduction to Gaelic! The illustrations were adorable and the words for the family are a great introduction for any young child to learn. I wish that there had been a bit more about words that young children would need to know early on, such as "milk" or "hungry" and the like. But for a language that is hard to learn and with such few resources, I was glad to see this being published!

I hope this is the first in a series because it was the first time I found a book that taught some Gaelic and how to pronounce it.
The pictures were lovely
I look forward to reading other books by this author.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I think this has been one of my biggest book disappointments so far this year. A picture book that teaches kids some basic Gaelic words that ties into a fairy story? Sign me up! I'm always interesting in learning more about my heritage. Unfortunately, this is one of the worst fiction/non-fiction picture books I've ever read.

The layout is all over the place. This is supposed to be a book for kids, and yet the first thing in it is an introduction for parents/teachers. That sort of material needs to be at the back of the book, or you run the risk of kids thinking it's not a book for them. There are also a lot of pages taken up by things like worksheets and a "This Book Belongs To" page. There are more notes for parents/teachers at the end. The unicorn is depicted (and the word translated) twice on one spread. The overall impression all of these things make is that the book was haphazardly thrown together.

The second major issue I have is with the pages that introduce the members of the family. I was confused as heck... because there's no English! It's just Gaelic words, and I had no idea if they were the fairies' names, or if they meant things like "son", "brother", or "boy", for example. (It wasn't until I went to write my review that I looked at the table of contents again. That's where the English is! Sorry, but that's going to confuse a lot of people.)

But the confusion doesn't stop there. Okay, so we've got nighean, which, according to the table of contents, means "girl". But in the glossary at the end, nighean means "daughter". Caileag means "girl". Bèibidh is "baby" according to the table of contents... but the glossary gives the word for "baby" as leanabh. Gaelic is difficult enough without confusing the issue!

I have to talk about the illustrations for a moment. You know those old Disney movies that used to combine hand-drawn animated characters with live-action settings? This book looks like it's trying to do that... but it isn't done well at all. The horribly drawn characters look like they were cut out and just slapped on a photograph. And I might have been more forgiving had the photos been beautiful. But they suffer variously from exposure problems, light leaks, and what looks like overprocessing in Photoshop.

I do like how the page numbers are written out in Gaelic along with the phonetic pronunciation. If looked at solely as a Gaelic counting book, then it probably has a little more value.

Gaelic is going to be a tricky subject for a beginner's picture book, anyway. If you're really interested in a Scottish language, I'd suggest having a look at Scots (a dialect of English) first. There are quite a few books that have been translated into Scots that are more accessible for beginners. I'd recommend taking a look at the wonderful A Wee Book o Fairy Tales in Scots by Matthew Fitt & James Robertson. Because it uses familiar stories, it's much easier to glean the meaning of the words from the context.